Are Google results good? I stop using Google years ago because of the garbage results (a lot of spam sites that were just serving data crawled from Github and other sites).
My primary search engine as of now is DDG, Their results are mostly fine (and powered partly by Bing). When their results are not good enough, I ask Google; often, but not always, it's better. For some other kinds of queries, Google fares notably worse than DDG, likely because SEO tricks are disproportionately directed against Google, and not always work against other search engines as effectively.
I've had my issues with Google ever since they ran a series of ads pretending to be for Blender but actually linking to a scam site. (I’m not sure if it’s gotten better since then.) While I do occasionally come across questionable ads on Bing, they’re definitely much less frequent. For what it’s worth, I’ve switched to using Edge as my browser as well, largely because Google refuses to address one of the most frustrating issues with its external link profile behavior. Specifically, Google forces external links to open in the last-used profile, rather than letting you choose, whereas Edge allows you to customize this behavior.
On top of that, Bing’s deep search feature has proven to be genuinely useful
If your search engine doesn't have ads that only means the adblocker has nothing to do except use some cpu cycles.
Those cycles are mostly earned back when you visit a link with ads (unless the search results are limited to ad free sites). So, it's still a net positive to have an ad-blocker.
> Specifically, Google forces external links to open in the last-used profile, rather than letting you choose, whereas Edge allows you to customize this behavior.
This is a neat feature, I used browserosaurus for a similar behaviour, but also that means I have multiple browsers open, one basically for each profile.
Running those same specific queries now, the Google results are as bad or worse than Bing's results at the time, and Bing now frequently gets the results that Google did at the time. But my everyday experience is still that Google gives generally better results than Bing / DDG.